Thinking about the actions of people and groups

We often make generalizations about the behavior of groups of people. We might say that college students are prone to binge drink or that older people tend to go to sleep early.  Presumably, if you believe that a group acts in a particular way, then you should assume that the members of that group are representative of the group as a whole.  If you believe that 40% of college students binge drink, then if you select a college student at random, you should assume that he or she has a 40% chance of being a binge drinker.

An interesting paper by Clayton Critcher and David Dunning in the January, 2013 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that we actually think about specific members of groups differently than we think about the group as a whole.

In a series of studies, these researchers demonstrated that people assume specific group members act more morally and more based on their individual will than the group as a whole.

In one study, for example, participants were told that researchers would be taking a poll of college students on a campus about whether they had engaged in a variety of behaviors.   Some of these behaviors had a strong moral or selfless component (like giving up a seat on a bus for an old person), while others were immoral or selfish (like not doing one’s share on a group project).  Participants making group predictions were asked what percentage of college students would respond that they had engaged in the behavior.  People making individual predictions were asked to think about a randomly selected student and were asked how likely it was that person engaged in these behaviors. 

For the moral/selfless behaviors, participants thinking about individuals rated that the person would be more likely to perform the behavior than those thinking about the group as a whole.  For the immoral/selfish behaviors there was no difference between those rating the individuals and those rating the group.

The researchers replicated this finding several times.  In one study, they took out the moral dimension and focused on individual will.  Some of the behaviors were ones that an individual would have to choose to do (like travel a long distance to see a favorite band perform), while others reflected a person acting along with social forces (like voting for the same political candidate as one’s parents).  Again, participants rated the likelihood of the behavior either for the individual or the group.

In this case, participants rated individuals as more likely than the group to perform a behavior when the behavior required individual will, but not when it reflected other social forces.

It seems that when we reason about individuals, we focus on elements that make individuals unique like their ability to initiate their own actions.  When we reason about groups, we focus on more general characteristics that drive many different people’s behavior.

This finding has interesting implications for our judgments of people’s guilt.  For example, if you think that individual people should be more moral than groups, then you might hold an individual highly responsible for his or her actions, even if their social group as a whole tends to perform the same behavior. 

Is willpower energy or motivation?

Anyone who has tried to break a bad habit has experienced the trouble with willpower.  You want to stick to your diet, but you find yourself standing at a buffet filled with tempting desserts.  You want to avoid the desserts, but before you know it, there is a beautiful piece of cake on your plate.  And at least for that night, the diet is blown.

Psychologists have been quite interested in understanding why willpower works so poorly.  Essentially, your action system has two components:  a Go System and a Stop System.  The Go System is the one that supports action.  It helps you engage in lots of activities that allow you to achieve your goals.  It also supports the many habits that allow you to get through your day effectively without having to think about the many actions you take on a daily basis. 

The Stop System (what we call willpower) applies the brakes to actions that are begun by the Go System, but conflict with some other newer goal.  Dieting is a great example.  You have built up lots of eating habits over the years.  When you decide to go on a diet, you are adding a new goal that conflicts with many of those eating habits.  You need your Stop System to prevent you from eating foots that would get in the way of your diet.

Unfortunately, the Stop System is not as efficient as the Go System.  Lots of things can interfere with it.  When you are stressed, the Stop System does not work so well.  Drugs and alcohol can prevent the Stop System from working.  In addition, lots of research on ego depletion suggests that when you use the Stop System a lot, it begins to work less effectively.  So, a long day of having to control yourself at work can get in the way of your diet is likely to be in peril.

There is an ongoing debate in the research community about why these ego depletion effects happen.  An intriguing set of studies by Matthew Gailliot and Roy Baumeister in a 2007 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review suggested that ego depletion may reflect actual energy levels within your body.  There were two kinds of data that led them to this conclusion.  First, they found that having to use the Stop System repeatedly led to decreases in blood glucose (sugar) levels (as measured with the kinds of glucometers that diabetics use regularly).  Second, they found that after making people use their Stop System, a high-glucose drink kicked the Stop System back into gear.

A number of other researchers questioned these findings, however.  A new set of studies by Daniel Molden, Chin Ming-Hui, Abigail Scholer, Brian Meier, Eric Noreen, Paul D’Agostino, and Valerie Martin in the October, 2012 issue of Psychological Science strongly suggests that failures of willpower reflect aspects of the motivational system, and not low levels of energy.

First, they repeated the physiological studies of blood glucose levels with more sensitive measuring equipment.  They taxed the Stop System using a task that has been used in previous studies.  They asked participants to look at a passage of text and cross out every letter e.  This is not hard to do.  Some participants then did the same task with a second passage.  Another group had to cross out every e that was not next to another vowel.  This latter task is harder and requires a lot of use of the Stop System.  They measured people’s blood glucose before and after doing this task.  Finally, they gave people a seven-letter word and asked them to generate as many smaller words as they could from the letters. 

Consistent with lots of previous work, people who just did the more difficult letter-crossing task spent less time generating words than people who did the easier task.  That is the typical ego depletion effect.  However, the measure of blood glucose levels showed no difference between the groups in their glucose levels.  That is, the more difficult self-control task did not consume more glucose than the easier task.

Next, the researchers explored the effect of drinking a high-sugar drink.  They pointed out that drinking a sugary drink could have many effects on a person.  Obviously, one is that it raises the level of glucose in the blood.  However, the taste of the glucose is pleasant, and that might make people happy.  Most importantly, the presence of glucose in the mouth might activate reward centers in the brain that could influence people’s motivation to perform a task. 

They explored this possibility in several other studies.  In one study, they had people do the same letter-crossing task I just described.  Then, people swished a sweet drink in their mouth and spit it out.  For some people, that sweet drink had an artificial sweetener in it (which does not activate reward centers in the brain), while for others the drink had glucose in it.  After that, people were asked to squeeze a hand grip for as long as they could.  Squeezing a hand grip has been used as a measure of persistence in other studies. 

The group that swished the drink with artificial sweetener showed the usual ego depletion effect.  Those who did the hard letter-crossing task held the grip for less time than those who did the easy letter-crossing task.  The group that swished the glucose drink in their mouth showed no ego-depletion effect.  They were able to hold the hand grip for about the same amount of time regardless of which letter-crossing task they did.  The researchers did a few other studies showing similar effects of glucose on more cognitive tasks. 

So, what does all this mean? 

Failures of willpower reflect the operation of the motivational system and not just a lack of energy.  How will this help you engage your Stop System?  If you find yourself in a difficult spot, try to find a way to give yourself a little reward.  When you stand in front of that buffet table filled with desserts, seek out a friend and have a fun conversation.  That rewarding conversation will help revive the Stop System and keep you on your diet.

This set of studies also shows how the scientific process works.  The initial studies had some intriguing results.  Whenever scientists find something new, others come along to explore the topic more fully.  Even though the initial explanation (that the Stop System requires energy) does not seem to be right, we have learned a lot about motivation from this initial set of studies.

When potential performance beats actual performance

We evaluate how people will act in the future all the time.  Hiring someone to do a job involves determining how well they will carry out that task.  Colleges make decisions about who they should admit based on their beliefs about how well the prospective student will perform in the future.  Couples who are dating decide whether to engage in a long-term partnership based on their beliefs about how they will interact in the distant future as a couple. 

What kind of information do we use to make the decision about future performance?

There are two sources of information you might use to judge the future.  One source of information is a person’s past performance.  Someone who has already demonstrated their ability to perform a task may be a good candidate to continue to perform well.  A second source of information is a person’s potential for the future.  That is, the person may not have achieved greatness yet, but may show signs of being on the cusp of greatness.

Which of these factors plays a greater role in judgments about the future?  You might think that current performance would play a greater role than potential.  After all, if someone has already demonstrated her ability to do something, that should be a good indication of future performance as well. 

An interesting paper in the October, 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Zakary Tormala, Jayson Jia, and Michael Norton suggests that in many situations people may give more weight to information about potential performance in the future than to actual performance in the past.

In one study, the authors took out a Facebook ad to promote the fan page of a comedian.  They created different versions of the ad.  Some versions focused on actual performance (“Critics say he has become the next big thing.”)  Other ads focused on potential performance (“Critics say he could become the next big thing.”)  People were more likely to click on ads that focused on potential performance than on actual performance.  They were also more likely to become Facebook fans of the comedian when the ad focused on potential performance than on actual performance.

A variety of laboratory studies demonstrated a similar effect with judgments about job candidates, athletes, and artwork.

Why does this happen?  The researchers suggest that statements about potential performance create more feelings about uncertainty than statements about actual performance.  This uncertainty leads people to think more about the options, and that gets them more involved with the option.

One way that the authors demonstrate this increased involvement is through studies that manipulate whether the information decision makers get is about potential or actual performance and also whether the information strongly or weakly supports the performance of the person being evaluated. 

In one study, participants read a letter of recommendation for a prospective graduate student.  The student was described either as having great potential for success or having already had great success in their academic ventures.  After this statement about actual or potential success, the letter describes what the prospective student has done.  The description is either very impressive (completed several projects, published a paper in a major scientific journal) or not so impressive after all (completed a project, published a paper in a campus journal). 

When the described performance was truly excellent, then the student described as having great potential was rated as a somewhat better candidate than the student described as having achieved great things.  However, when the described performance was mediocre, then the student described as having achieved great things was rated as a better candidate than the student who was described as having great potential.

That is, when the student was described as having great potential, people paid more attention to the actual accomplishments than when the student was described as having achieved great things already. 

What can you do with this information?

When you have to evaluate someone in the future, recognize that information about potential will lead you to be more involved in the evaluation than information about actual performance.  Try to counteract this tendency by exploring what people have already done.  In many situations, a person’s past accomplishments are an excellent predictor of what they will do in the future. 

What do (linguistic) hedges do?

The next time you find yourself in a waiting room, train station, or airport, find a comfortable seat and listen to people speak.  There are a lot of interesting things going on in the language people use.  One of them is the use of hedges.

A hedge is a marker of uncertainty in language.  Imagine the following situation:  A parent questions a teenage child on a Sunday morning.  He says, “What time did you come home last night?”  The teenager might respond in a number of ways.

 “I got home at midnight.” 

 “I got home at around midnight.” 

 “I got home at midnight, I think.” 

 “I got home at, like, midnight.” 

The first answer has no hedge in it.  The next two sentences use the hedges ‘around’ and ‘I think.’  Both of these hedges are a way of saying that the answer is approximate and that it may not be exactly correct.  The last answer uses the word ‘like.’  It is less clear what the word ‘like’ is doing in this sentence.  It might be a hedge as well, though it might just be a way of emphasizing what is being said.

Do these hedges matter?

This question was explored by Kris Liu and Jean E. Fox Tree in a paper in the October, 2012 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.  These researchers suggested that hedges might call attention to the information that they mark, and so that information might be well-remembered by listeners. At the same time, hedges might mark information as unreliable, and so the information might not be retold by listeners later.

In one study, Liu and Fox Tree looked at whether information would be retold by listeners.  In this study, two participants came to the lab.  At the start of the study, one participant was asked to tell a story (for example, a story about a large purchase they had made recently).  After telling this story, both the teller and the listener were brought into separate rooms and were asked to retell the story.  Then, the pair did this again, only now the listener from the first part of the study told a story.

The researchers were particularly interested in people’s memories for numbers that were used in the original story.  Would these quantities be put in the story when it was retold?

When people used a quantity in the story without a hedge (“The shirt cost $15.”) it was quite likely to be used in a retelling of the story both by the original speaker and by the listener.  Quantities with a ‘like’ (“The shirt cost, like, $15.”) were also used in retellings.  Quantities that were hedged (“The shirt cost around $15.”) were not included in retellings of the story.

So far, that makes sense.  When you use a hedge, it marks the information as unreliable, so you would expect that it would not be included as a detail when retelling a story.

In a second study, one of the stories told by a participant in the first study was played for a new group of participants.  The story had many quantities in it.  Some of them involved hedges and some involved ‘likes.’  In some versions of the story, the hedges were removed from the recording.  In other versions the ‘likes’ were removed.  After people heard the story, they were asked specific questions about the story that involved the quantities (“How much did the shirt cost?”)

When the quantity had a “like” with it, it was equally well remembered, regardless of whether the “like” was present in the recording.  Interestingly, when the quantity had a hedge with it, it was actually better remembered when the hedge was there than when it was not.  That means that the hedge caused the information to be better remembered, even though that information was not used later in a retelling of the story.

Why would this happen?

Hedges cause people to think more about the information that is hedged.  In order to understand what the hedge is doing, you have to work a little harder to figure out why the speaker would want to qualify what they are saying.  The more work you put into something, the more likely you are to remember it later.

However, once you understand the hedge, you realize that it is telling you that the quantity is just approximate.  So, you may remember that quantity better, but you also realize that you do not need to treat it as an exact number.  As a result, you may not pass it along to other people.

Finally, the word ‘like’ does not seem to work the same way as other hedges.  One reason for that is that ‘like’ has become a crutch that many people use when they are speaking.  They fill lots of space in their speech with the word ‘like.’  As a result, it may not have any specific meaning for listeners. 

Multicultural experiences decrease prejudice

Prejudice is a constant presence in the news.  Many of the trouble spots around the world are plagued by sectarian violence in which one group preys on another.  In the United States, race is a simmering issue behind the scenes in political discussions.  

Because prejudice is so pervasive, there has been a lot of interest in understanding factors that might reduce it.  A fascinating paper by Carmit Tadmor, Ying-yi Hong, Melody Chao, Fon Wiruchnipawan, and Wei Wang in the November, 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that having a multicultural experience can decrease prejudice.

For example, in one study, Caucasian-American college students participated in a study in which they were going to have to evaluate resumes of six job applicants.  The resumes were constructed so that two of the resumes were much higher quality than the other four.  The names on the resumes were manipulated, so that half of them had stereotypically White names and half had stereotypically Black names.  The names were randomly assigned to the resumes in different ways for different participants, so any difference in evaluation of the resumes from people with Black and White names has to result from the name and not the quality of the resume.

Prior to evaluating the resumes, some participants watched a video that contained images of both American and Chinese culture.  Much previous research shows that watching these videos gives people a greater appreciation of the similarities and differences between American and Chinese culture.  Two other groups of participants watched either a video with only images from American culture or with images only from Chinese culture.

Participants who saw videos with images from only one culture recognized that some of the resumes were stronger than others, but they generally felt that the strong resume from the person with the White name was better than the strong resume from the person with the Black name.  Those who saw the video with images from both American and Chinese culture evaluated the strong resumes equally, regardless of the name on them.  So, having a multicultural experience decreased prejudice.

Other studies in this series found that people given a multicultural experience were also less likely to endorse negative stereotypes about groups.

Why does this happen?

The researchers suggest that having a multicultural experience decreases peoples Need for Closure. Need for Closure is the extent to which people need to be finished thinking about something.  The higher your Need for Closure, the more that you use secondary sources of information to make judgments.  So, when you are high in Need for Closure, you might focus more on a person’s race rather than the quality of his or her resume when making a hiring decision.

To demonstrate this possibility, the researchers found that people given a multicultural experience (like watching a video with both American and Chinese images) decreased their ratings on a scale designed to measure Need for Closure relative to those who saw images from only one culture.  Furthermore, these measured differences in Need for Closure were a good statistical explanation for the differences in prejudice found between groups.

This set of studies is yet another demonstration of the positive effects of having multicultural experience.  The more that you bear in mind the variety of cultures that exist in this world, the better able you are to focus on factors that really matter when making a decision, rather than using secondary characteristics like a person’s race.

Choices you make today can affect you for years to come

People are often creatures of habit in the choices they make.  A brand of toothpaste that you start to buy as a college student can easily become the brand you purchase most often for the rest of your adult life. 

There are lots of reasons why you might stick with a particular brand for a long time.  For one thing, your early experience with a product might help you decide that you really like it, which can lead you to keep buying it in the future.  For another, in many situations, the actual differences in performance between brands are small, and so it probably does not matter a lot what you choose.  In that case, you may as well minimize the amount of effort you spend making a choice, and so buy what you bought last time.

There is also some evidence that the act of making a choice can influence your preferences.  Studies suggest that when you choose one item over another, the act of making a choice enhances your preference for the thing you choose and causes you to devalue the thing you reject.

Of course, most studies that have explored this question have looked only at short-term changes in people’s preferences.  Most psychology studies take about an hour, and so the studies usually look just at changes in what people like over the course of that hour-long period.

An interesting study by Tali Sharot, Stephen Fleming, Xiaoyu Yu, Raphael Koster, and Raymond Dolan in the October, 2012 issue of Psychological Science looked at the effect of making a choice on people’s preferences 3-years later.

In their study, participants came to the lab and rated how interested they were in going to a variety of vacation destinations.  Those ratings provided a baseline.   One group of participants then made choices among pairs of vacation destinations.  The choices were set up so that some were easy choices where one vacation spot was already strongly preferred to the other.  The rest of the choices were set up to be difficult—the two destinations were equally preferred at the start of the study.  A second group saw similar pairs of vacation destinations, but the computer chose vacation spots for them.  Next, participants rated how much they liked each vacation destination again as a short-term measure of how choices affected preferences. 

Some of the participants were contacted about three years later and were shown the same set of vacation destinations.  Once again, they rated their preferences.

What happened? 

The strongest finding in these studies came from the condition in which people made hard choices between destinations they liked equally.  Soon after making this choice, they gave a higher preference rating to the destination they chose compared to the destination they rejected.  Three years later, people’s preferences for destinations they chose persisted.  They still preferred the destination they chose to the one they rejected.  People who had the computer select a destination for them showed no reliable change in preference either immediately or after a three-year delay.

When the choice was easy for people to make, a different pattern emerged.  When people made easy choices, it had no effect on their preferences right away.  Three years later, people’s preference for items they chose actually went down compared to the items they rejected. 

What is going on here?

A choice is difficult when you have to select from among a set of options that you like about equally well.  These difficult choices require attention and effort.  You may also feel a little uncomfortable making these choices.   After you make the choice, the same mechanisms that are involved in cognitive dissonance will work to make your choice feel consistent with your beliefs.  So, when you make a difficult choice, you will bump up your preference for the thing you selected and you will push down your preference for the thing you rejected. 

The fascinating thing about this effect, though, is that it can still be seen years later.  That means that choices you make today may be with you for years to come.